When Shadows Meet
by ncfan
Summary: Some shadows don't leave. [Spoilers, Triggers.]


[Content Note/Trigger Warning: Sexual abuse; sexual abuse of children by their step-parent; incest]

Note: This fic posits that Corisande was abused by her stepfather, as Kevan was. I gave this an M rating less because anything explicit's been put on here and more because I didn't want anyone who might find this triggering to stumble upon it by accident.

I own nothing.

* * *

Corisande missed her father. She knew that, at fifteen, she was a grown woman and as a grown woman she should be able to mourn without breaking down crying at odd times for no reason at all other than because she missed him. But she missed her father, nonetheless.

Her half-brother had removed to Mead, where he was now duke. In comparison to their father, Corisande did not miss Hyacinth at all. He had never been a kind boy, not even when they were children together. Corisande's earliest concrete memory of Hyacinth involved her mother screaming at him for dangling little Charmion over a fish pond and laughing when she wailed in terror—Charmion couldn't swim, and on top of that, Hyacinth had told her that the fish in the pond were fed little girls. Frankly, when Hyacinth had left for Mead, it was all Corisande could not do to jump for joy and cheer his passing. As little patience as her mother had for Hyacinth's behavior, Arisse would have had less tolerance for any of her children, let alone her oldest, showing cheer at the prospect of their family separating.

Arisse remarried less than a year after the death of her first husband. The Duchess of Lillah was practically a queen in her own lands; she could remarry as soon after her husband's death as she liked, and no one could say a word. She had married very much beneath her station, to a wealthy merchant, but a commoner nonetheless. The Duchess of Lillah was practically a queen in her own lands, and so long as she did not attempt to pronounce any of her children by her second husband her heir, no one would say a word.

Not even Corisande.

She would be lying, though, if she said that she liked her stepfather. Corisande did not like Jael at all, hadn't from the moment he moved into her mother's house. Jael had always presented himself as a plainspoken man, candid to the point of bluntness. That suited Arisse just fine; she never could stand simpering men (And Corisande, who didn't mind a bit of flattery herself, missed her father all the more, as he had been a flatterer himself). Corisande had thought him unpolished, but had attributed this to his background—a merchant would have to be able to drive a hard bargain. She had nothing against him based on his birth; Corisande did not see what Jael's birth had to do with it though.

Sometimes, though, Corisande wished that her mother _did_ care about things like whether the man she wished to marry came from a noble house or the peasantry. She wished that her mother was one of those noblewomen who would not have looked twice at a commoner and would have turned her nose up at the concept of marrying him. Bitterly, she wished that Arisse, who always prided herself on seeing clearly and being possessed of unsparing understanding, could see that there was more to dislike in her husband than simply that he was blunt and of common birth.

Corisande felt jagged pain shoot down her thighs when she walked, and she missed her father. If her father was alive, this wouldn't be happening.

It was night, the falling shadows of dusk enveloping her bedchamber in welcome gloom. It was a warm late summer night over the arid grasslands of Lillah, and Corisande enjoyed leaving her windows open, so that she could look out and see the stars. A soft, dry breeze whispered into her room, but Corisande had learned how to tell creaking hinges from whispering wind, and when she heard her door creak open, her heart leapt into her throat. "Who's there?" she called out fearfully, huddling by the wall and swallowing hard.

"It's just me," came the reply, from a voice that Corisande recognized, and did not fear.

"Kevan!" she hissed in a scolding tone. "Why don't you ever knock first?"

He drew closer to her, and in the dark, Corisande could see her brother shrug. "Do I need to?" Kevan asked, in that familiar mulish way of his. But there was a faint shake underneath it. "Would you have let me in if I had knocked?"

_Would you have known it was me if I had knocked? _Corisande heard ringing in her own ears, even if her brother never said the words aloud. Her brother: so strident, so _loud, _and yet the majority of what he said, the important things he said, never actually passed his lips.

_I wish I could tell Mother._

_She'd never believe me._

_She'd never believe __**us**__._

_And even if she did, what would she say? She'd probably just blame us. He always says she'd just blame us, that it's our fault. I'm afraid of finding out if that's the truth._

Corisande sighed and leaned over to latch her windows shut. Though she had no mirror in front of her, she could guess at the lines that were digging deep into her brow. She tried not to guess at how long it was taking her to latch the windows, thanks to her shaking hands.

For whatever reason, Kevan did not wait for her to answer the questions he had spoken aloud. He rarely did that, even as the sweet, biddable child that he had once been. "You're going back to school next week, aren't you?" he pressed. "The boarding school?"

Corisande nodded slowly, finally latching the windows and smoothing down her mussed hair (Despite it being dark, and knowing that Kevan didn't care about the way her hair looked; it had become force of habit for her). "Yes, I am." As much as she shouldn't have been happy about leaving Kevan alone (because at least when she was here she could protect him, even if only a little bit), Corisande was always happy when she left home to return to school after breaks. She dreaded the end of term at winter and summer.

Kevan clenched his jaw and stared down at his feet. "I wish I could go to school," he muttered, scuffing his bare foot against the tile floor. "I'm sick of having nothing but tutors." _I'm sick of being here_.

"It's… It's just one more year," Corisande supplied wearily. "One more year, Kevan." She didn't know what else to say to him anymore. She had no words to assuage his pain, or his fear.

If anyone else had said something to Kevan that carried with it the implication of _'Be patient_', he likely would have snapped at them. But from Corisande's lips, all the words garnered was a stiff nod of the head. "I know," he mumbled. Kevan fixed his green eyes on her. "Can I sleep with you tonight?"

There was no use telling him that, tomorrow morning, when Arisse found out she'd scold them both—Kevan for crawling in bed with his sister when he was twelve years old, and Corisande for letting him do so. "Of course," Corisande murmured instead, and beckoned him towards the bed.

-0-0-0-

As Corisande grew older, her smiles had grown sharper and yet rarer. Her already heavy-lidded eyes became perpetually downcast, so that she rarely ever looked anyone directly in the eye. It was unusual for her to raise her voice, unusual for her to laugh or cry or scream or shout.

In a letter from home, her mother praised her on how composed she had become. In those same letters, Arisse wrote with disappointment of Kevan's increasingly explosive temper, how he seemed to take offense at even the softest footfall of a chambermaid.

Corisande bit her lip and swallowed down on her own bitterness to keep it from spilling out onto the parchment. She would have been saying too much. Instead, she wrote of her studies, of her friends, and asked after Kevan and Charmion and her young half-siblings as well (No matter who their father was, she loved them). She did not ask after Hyacinth, and Arisse seemed to excuse the oversight. She put her letters away, and did all she could not to think of home.

-0-0-0-

"I don't understand you."

In the end, Corisande had married Ignatius as young as she had to get out of the house. Her mother had had nothing to complain about in regards to the match. Duke Paulus of Ursul had disowned his son, but everyone knew that there were compelling extenuating circumstances for that, and seemed more unimpressed with Ignatius's sister for not following his lead. _"You will come into that marriage in a position of strength_," Arisse had said, and Corisande wondered why she thought this so important.

Jael had tried to make some protest when Corisande had requested that she and Ignatius have a house of their own in the city, away from Arisse's estate. Corisande had felt her blood chill in her veins when her stepfather remarked that they were rather young to be living on their own, but mercifully, Arisse had looked at him strangely and replied that it was only natural that they would wish to have some freedom, as new as they were to that most adult of institutions. Corisande and Ignatius ended up moving into a villa off of the canal, perhaps not as far from the estate as Corisande would have wished, but still, it was a house of her own, and a house where her stepfather did not live.

"What don't you understand?" Corisande asked evenly, as she did the last inspection of all of the rooms. "Briony!" she called into the solarium, and if her little daughter scowled at her as she trotted up to her parents, Corisande pretended not to notice.

Ignatius smiled down at Briony and ruffled her hair (the four-year-old giggled at that; Ignatius had always had an easy way with children that Corisande lacked), before turning his attention back to his wife. "You've just become a _duchess_, Corisande. I would have thought you'd be happier." He, of course, knew that Hyacinth's death was not exactly something widely mourned by his family.

Corisande had no illusions of why Ignatius had begun courting her in school. He was the disinherited son of a noble house. His mother was a landless third daughter of a previous Duke of Kigal, so it wasn't as though he had his mother's inheritance to fall back on. Ignatius was no fool, and while neither was he a predator, he did know where to look for the greatest opportunities. Corisande hadn't really been expecting a marriage based on love, anyways.

(She was glad, at least, that Ignatius had made no fuss upon finding that his new bride was not a virgin. There was no way he could have missed that. Queen Ladesh had repealed the laws that dictated that _anyone_ had to be a virgin upon entering marriage and that someone discovering that their spouse had not been a virgin when they married was reasonable grounds for divorce, but that hadn't been so long ago. Ignatius still could have raised a fuss if he'd wanted to. He would never know how grateful Corisande was that he hadn't.)

Ignatius seemed to enjoy being part of her family, at least. The ducal family of Ursul was a small one, and even before Ignatius had been disinherited, he hadn't exactly been held in high regard by his father. Julianna had shown an aptitude for magic from a young age; Paulus had favored her above his son, had always done so. The Duchess of Lillah's family, by contrast, was a large one where, while there was similar jockeying for Arisse's favor, there was no fear that they would be cast out by her for not living up to her standards (_There was just that fear for other reasons_). Ignatius found himself well-liked by his wife's younger siblings; he was accepted here as he had never been in Ursul.

Corisande frowned. "Hyacinth did not leave affairs in an… orderly state." He had behaved according to his nature until the very end, and had paid for it, but that wasn't going to be enough for the denizens of Mead, especially not those whose family members had _disappeared_ during Hyacinth's time as duke. "I have a feeling that what was left for me to deal with will not be pleasant."

Ignatius smiled encouragingly. "I've never known you not to overcome challenges before."

To this, Corisande could only nod slightly, and move on to her inspection of the rest of the villa.

At least Mead's ducal seat was far away from here. But Ignatius had never asked her why she had nightmares about a shadowed stranger slipping into their bedchamber, so she didn't expect him to understand.

-0-0-0-

"So he is dead?"

Kevan looked away from her and nodded. He had arrived here only an hour beforehand, refusing to let anyone touch him even to brush the dust from his shoulders and refusing to speak to anyone but Corisande. Briony gaped, Ignatius frowned and little Noll fussed in his father's arms to hear his uncle's strident tones as he demanded to speak with the Duchess of Mead alone.

Corisande heaved a sigh of relief, momentarily feeling something very much like the urge to cry sweep over her, before it was boxed up with every other inconvenient emotion. She had heard that their mother had divorced Jael, but she'd not that she would…

That didn't matter now.

"She does know, then?" Corisande began going through the motions of latching shut her bedchamber windows, and ignored her shaking hands.

Kevan's nod was choppier this time; he swallowed hard as if on bile. "Yes, Mother knows," he said bitterly. "Not about you, Corisande," he added, "But she does know. Why do you think I'm here and not there?" His tone was one of misery wrapped up in impotent rage, a tone she had heard him take too many times, spilling from his mouth and his skin.

Corisande wrapped her arms around him, and the embrace Kevan gave back was too tight and too possessive. She said nothing. Jael's shadow was not one that would ever leave them, after all.


End file.
